TABBY CAT Gamespace

Wrong end of the gun

Wendell Berry has a good piece on Peak Oil and general environmental trashing, the need to accept limits, etc. in the most recent Harpers Magazine (May 2008).

It's nice, his heart is in the right place, and he talks interestingly about the Faustian echoes in our refusal to accept any limits and so on.

But... to me this guy, Berry, who has a good track record of writing about economy and environment, he's just not in the game. While he's fussing with his tepid dinkly intellectualism, he misses the big picture, or should I say, the deep picture. Which is as follows:

The world is controlled by the Inner Party (Orwell's term) or High Command (Tabby's term). However you toetag them these guys are absolutely, resolutely, and immutably IN LOVE with:

• Money
• Machines
• Death

They love that stuff and NOTHING will ever change that. Not all the professorial gibbering about Faust or any other damn faggot nonsense (if I may paraphrase the Command's general point of view) is going to have any effect on that. All that crap, to them, is for girlie men.

And I do say 'men', advisedly. You cannot talk about these issues sensibly with bringing gender into it. The High Command is basically all men. The Outer Party, the intelligent functionaries and useful idiots who keep it all going, they are also mostly men, or in any case aping skill sets and thought motifs developed by human males as opposed to females.

The Proles of course are men and women. The male proles would wish to ape the Inner Party, in love with money, machines and death. But they are drugged with sex and TV as John Lennon has noted elsewhere. So they are out of the game. Meanwhile the female proles live in self-constructed emotional fantasy worlds, so they are pretty easy to mind control as well

Meanwhile, the Outer Party technologists continue to work on ever badder ass weaponry, so much beloved of the High Command. The megadeaths from atomic weapons and firebombs and so on of 1945 was just a little preflight check compared to what these guys have in mind. You might ask then why the relatively long period of relative calm and peace in the over-developed world, at least since 1945? Does that mean I'm wrong after all about these guys loving death so much? Naw they were just re-stocking the pond and re-greasing the skids, sharpening their axes.

Guys like Berry don't have or at least don't show any feel at all for the sheer overwhelming scale of  pure weaponery that exists in this world now. Not to mention other technologies of control, surveillance and so on. Is there even a ghost of a chance that the High Command would ever allow any radical social/economic change that in even the slightest degree impaired or impeded or even decelerated this death march? No chance in hell. None. They'll see us all dead first, and I mean that literally.

You can't reason with these guys. The High Command is psychopathic by nature and by definition. A guy like Berry will get as far with them as anybody got reasoning with Anton Sigur in the recent film No Country for Old Men.

Run with it

Movies really suck these days. Look at the recent (2007) movie Sublime, whose high concept is obviously totally ripped from the superb movie Jacob's Ladder (1990), itself done from a much older screenplay that gathered dust in Hollywood for decades).

Sublime fumbles with similar themes but totally miscarries the ball and is just plain stupid (though I will admit it is excellent fodder for mediphobics such as myself. Yes damn right I am iatrophobic after suffering through three massive neurosurgeries (that is drilling through the skull deep into the brain three separate sites/occasions, not to mention uncounted number of spinal taps and other procedures that would make Torquemada himself weep with envy and drool with lust, during my six months hospitalization at age eight for ... what exactly?)

But I digress, I was in the process of kicking Hollywood's ass for putting out such stupid crap as Sublime. And look at the recent movie Invasion (2007) - total crap, especially compared to its own high concept precursor, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). I don't mind at all that these tools haven't got a single original thought in their heads, that's expected, but nowadays even the execution sucks.

Actually I have a great idea for a blowout cool movie. I'll give it away here for free, just to show you what a nice feline I really am, underneath all the sarcasm, arrogance, and hostility that are my blog's stock in trade.

Here ya go: somebody needs to make an animated version of Hesse's novel Siddhartha. Everybody loves this book, uncounted zillions have read it so the market is ready made just waiting to be scooped up into some smart producer's bank accuont. But the animation work would need to be really good, deep art, total psychedelic. And the soundtrack should be carefully selected greatest-hits type of chants by Deva Premal, Jai Uttal, and others of that caliber. I know there was a lousy super cheesy 1970's live action version of S but this time it needs to be done right, and with all these yoga bunnies everywhere it just couldn't miss. On second thought I take it back about giving this away free - I take my finder fees in catnip (no cheap ass streetnip, it has to be high grade Burmese Blue).

Advice: Soulnapping

Dear Tabby,

A dear friend of mine was mindnapped by a passing InterGalatic Soul Slaver  and sold down into the Earth plane as a Mind Cow. After some decades of human life, he died off the physical and we welcomed him back up here but he seems to have suffered total mental breakdown. This used to be a pretty intelligent spook, nobody's tool, but just the one cycle on that damn Earth-plane Time Space Illusion merry-go-round and now he's seriously fucked up. I mean this is an entity who used to be able to navigate with ease and fluency in all 1077 Quantum Cosmicized Infibulatory Dimensional Toroids and now his conversation is 100% range-bound on the Three Standard Human Obsessions:  Money, Health, and Personal Relationships. Don't get me wrong Tabby, I love the guy like a brother, but honestly what a fricking bore. I fear that if he goes human even one more time, he'll be lost to all higher sanity and rationality forever. Worst thing of all, he now goes around like some kind of loudmouth jackoff trying to get everybody else to jump into the human body wetsuit. He's practically become a one-soul embedded propaganda organ for the TSI.  So I need your best thinking here Tabby - how could this have happened to an otherwise intelligent entity? And, should I have him ectoplasmically restrained against his will,  stop him before he shills again?

- Wit's End

Dear Wits,

In the 1970's the Earth Plane millionaire heiress girl Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and subsequently joined the group and loudly espoused their vision of revolutionary terror. On the Earth Plane this is called the Stockholm Syndrome, when a captive takes on the mentality of the captors due to the extreme stress and fear triggered by the experience. Well, see, something a bit similar happens to many entities who for any reason get their toe dipped into the Time Space Illusion, especially when they do their TSI time as human. They start to actually identify with the human body and social role. In other words, his mind is now shot to shit. This can happen to any entity, even (or especially) the smart ones, and fore-knowledge of the existence of the Stockhom Syndrome is no defense at all. I feel your pain but if you really care for this friend you will need to stage an intervention. Good luck and write me when the dust settles how you guys are doing - I care.

Workshop date

"The secret of tai ch'i ch'uan is this - never apply nor accept more than four ounces of force."

- Cheng Man Ch'ing

I got the date nailed down for my semi-annual Cheng style taiji sampler seminar, it will be Saturday July 12, probably 10 AM to about 3 or 4 PM or so with midday break, at ETM. The workshop will be held if enough of those who have expressed initial interest eventually follow through as actual pre-regs (once the actual seminar notice is posted on ETM site).

Then and there I will show and tell the meaning of the above quote from Professor Zheng, how it applies to both form and push training, along with lots of other stuff, including but not limited to perpetual questions such as:

- Should we be practicing the combative applications of the Taiji techniques contained in the form?
- What is the relation if any between Taiji and Qigong?
- What is the best way to arrange/allocate your practice time?
- Must I do the entire form to get benefits?
- Isn't the Zheng shortened form less useful than the longer forms out there?
- Practicing non-Taiji calesthentics or exercises while on the Taiji path: Useful? Harmful? Irrelevant? Essential?
- Why is Zheng style or approach radically distinct from any other Taiji approach out there?

And tons more. The meat of the seminar will be the Five Principles and Two Fundamental Postures of the Zheng style, and I will  spend significant time doing push hands 1-1 with each attendee who wishes to do so, whether you are a  starting-line zero total newbie or a multi-decades Taiji or martial art instructor.

But right now I have bigger fish to fry. I am analyzing the current food shortage and crisis. I figure this may be some kind of trick orchestrated by Monsanto for the purpose of decisively overcoming all global resistance to GMO seeds and foods, once and for all, forever. Enough of this and it will be ok ok, GMO GMSCHMO, just give us the fricking food. That will really boost the book value of their patent portfolio. Smart.

Oh? Do I hear some snickering? That kind of thing can't happen? Something along the lines of "There's that nutcase Tabby mouthing off about his usual conspiracy kookiness". Is that it? Before you go too far with that and make a fool of yourself, dig this book:  The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald.

Quick Peak

I'm reading the book Last Light by Alex Scarrow. It will be of interest to those who anticipate Peak Oil - the end of cheap, easy, secure oil supplies in the Western world.

The book presents an accelerated peak, or an Artificial Peak, if you will, in which the oil lifelines to Europe (and USA) are cut by civil war and revolution in the Middle East. This stuffs the drawn out Peak Oil madness into a short time frame.

Within a couple of days of the main mideast suppliers shutting down, the main cities of Western Europe and USA are in flames as rioters loot every food and gasoline outlet or depot that isn't nailed down. Electricity is cut shortly thereafter and a new Dark Age begins to descend. The British and USA military forces are hastily recalled from Iraq and Afghanistan in an attempt to maintain some semblance of security at (supposedly crucial mil.gov installations.

This book is a scary picture of what could happen in just 72 hours if oil were actually cut off. Even without that, there are now food purchase restrictions at some retail stores in the USA.

But why wasn't anybody interested in all this ten years ago, when Jay and I and many others began to discuss it, something still could have been done then. Now it's all too late.

Ah, what's that? Excuse me? You say you don't believe in Peak Oil? Well good then after you have viewed Matt Simmons' analysis, write him and tell him exactly where he's got it all wrong.

Bends

Somebody asked me about flexibility, because I wrote something like "I don't care much about flexibility because I train only for raw ki power applied to combatives and healing." I said I got as much from my 10 minute traditional Shaolin warmup every morning as from my 1 year of 1.5 hours Ashtanga Primary Series training, every morning 6 AM sharp either in my home city or here in Tokyo.

Well that's right. Flexibility is good if you are into certain sports or contortionism. But it isn't useful for fighting or healing, and after much backing and forthing I've decided yoga could be dangerous to your joints. But what the frick do I know, I only speak and write for myself alone. Do whatever you want. For me, when I was a teen hot into the Shaolin training, we needed the extreme flexibilty because in addition to the hardcore sparring of Tien Shan Pai, I was on our little public demo team. When I was 15, 16, around then our school would participate in the DC Chinese New Years and other demos at schools and other Chinese culture festivals and so on, and I'd do some 2 man sets with my classmates (such as staff vs staff or broadsword vs staff, etc.) and we needed hyper stretching for those Northern Shaolin routines. Makes a good show but that's all. Who cares about show, not me anymore.

Photo on this post is me back in the day, doing... what? - 3rd Series Hanumanasana?

*Tabby rends the morning jungle calm with a disturbingly authentic simian screech*

But the Shaolin warmup for all these years enabled me to get the following semi-difficult Ashtanga stretches within a few month of beginning the practice. These are things that many elder males would take longer to get or never get:

• Prasarita Padottanasana A
• Marichyasana D (1 side every day, other side some days, haha)
• Kurmasana (chest and chin flat on floor)
• Gaba Pindasana (chin in hands with roll)
• Padmasana
• Baddha Padmasana (toes caught!)

But of course there were lots of other Primary poses I could not do, so what. I kind of sucked at yoga but no matter its in the rear view mirror now anyway. None of it matters, only ki.

As for flexibility in real combatives, high Tae Kwan Do kicks are mostly useless, I no longer train them. I remember Mikhail Ryabko was once asked in a seminar;

"Is it true what we've heard that Systema has no kicks to the head?"
Mikhail: Not true at all... (then he instantly slammed a big guy to the floor and while the guy lay there prone, momentarily stunned, Mikhail kicked his head - height: about 3 inches off the floor)

How can you just leave me standing?

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold.
Maybe I'm just too demanding.
- Prince 'When Doves Cry'

I have studied under a number of teachers, often quite intensively. But if/when I ever find that a given program is no longer 100% aligned with my own goals and progress, I firmly, coldly, surgically even, cut it loose. I have had to be very cold about this. Not that anybody really cares, but I do feel bad about it sometimes. Yet it must be this way - Ars longa, vita brevis “Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή”, isn't that right?

The program must exist only and strictly to help develop me - most crucially to me the point is not to PROGAGATE THE STYLE. Many teachers do seem to assume that you exist for the style rather than the style existing for you. There is a DNA-like, ever so slightly mindless Xerox-copy mentality to many training programs, propagation is what really counts to them.

I totally understand and sympathize. Yet I cannot subsume myself under the program, sadly it must always be the other way around. Otherwise I'll never get anywhere. But there's always that human social element that tends to anchor you back to an otherwise no longer optimal training community. Well just another typical human thing.

Of course you can never be absolutely sure that you've done quite enough to check something out, exhaust all its potential. Sure you could always do another class, another year of training, another training trip, practice more of it, harder on it, squeeze it more tightly to see what juice it may yet yield down the road. That mentality actually is part of my approach. I don't pick it up lightly (with just a weekend seminar) nor do I put it back on the shelf lightly. And no matter how intensively you train something, even methods that promise immediate and permanent benefits, it seems that the light is always away at the distant end of the tunnel, you haven't ever done nearly enough, the best is yet to come always. But I don't let that kind of mind control distract me. I won't be living on this planet in this body forever, in fact who knows how long. I have to optimize my resource usage.

So I dive in, work it hard, and after a while, no matter how many years of sunk cost are involved, if either (a) it has not delivered to spec and/or (b) its potential seems exhausted, I'm outta there. Dustbin of (my personal history! Nothing wrong with any method per se, I am strictly 100% interested in its effect on me me me. Only this and nothing more. And if the given program or method doesn't deliver up to spec and on time, well then it becomes neither an asset nor a responsibilty. It's toast.

I do sometimes retain some little collateral thing from every training program. For example from my decades of Shaolin training, begun as a young teen (13) I have retained the exemplary and perfectly optimal (time, space, effort, result) Tien Shan Pai Shaolin warmup system, which I've performed every morning practically forever and still now. I find it preserves whatever flexibilty I've ever had just as well as Ashtanga yoga, in a tiny fraction of the time and effort input. I don't even care much about flexibility anyway, I only care about raw ki power for combat and healing. But anyway, that Tien Shan Pai warmup routine is a good example of what I call optimality. That's what I like.

Some training does not really try to colonize your brain and mind-control you into total zombification and cult induction, there are some things you can just pick and and put down any time, whatever, whenever. Usually these are things that are not strictly identified with a single teacher or proprietary group. Boxing is a good example of that type of training, no reason to quit that, just continue off and on as the spirit moves from time to tome.

I compensate for my ruthless coldness in this area by being a goody two shoes gold-star student while I am immersed in whatever training.

That means Three Principles as below:

1. Practice hard as a student, be courteous, helpful, - be the best possible student you can while you are training there.
2. Pay fully, on time, and even more than necessary support the whole activity economically as much as possible.
3. Never but never, for the rest of your life, teach whatever you learned from the program without explicit full and unqualified permission to do so (which usually wouldn't be forthcoming when you have droppped out of a program, but that's fine, it's just a good principle to have).

Sometimes I have dropped something after many many years of hard training, such as Iaido Japanese sword, sometimes after a brief but intense year of committed training, such as Ashatang yoga, sometimes after multiple sporadic but intensive long distance trips for training such as Seamm Jasani/Boabom, sometimes even after multiple decades of training such as Shaolin Tian Shan Pai, and so so so many more that I can't even list here.

Why drop anything? Because no matter how great something is, once it drifts even one nautical degree off the long-distant course I have set, the one channel marker I adhere to, its completely pointless, its become mere "socializing and sentiment". And then I'm outtta there.

But  few things have been so great that I never abandon them, and foremost of those of course is the Cheng Manching taijiquan training, that never fails to deepen continuously. I hang with Systema also over the years, as Vlad is a historical level figure of martial arts greatness.

Scanner Darkly

Good new-ish piece by Kunstler about the end of the oil age or his anticipated implosion of industrial civilization, which I've been into for many years now. Not that I do much about it - but I see it coming. But when I first glommed onto this, from Jay Hanson, no mainstream media was talking about it. Of course oil was like 20 USD/bb back then - it hit 116 USD/bb on Friday. Anyway you can check out my Amazon review of Kunstler's newish book on it.

And here's a good new piece by Professor Stephen Jones on the 9-11 false flag USD mil.gov Psyop known as "9-11". That's another thing I glommed onto immediately (well, in early 2002) that 9-11 was a total scam, just Riechstag Fire II. But nobody wanted to hear about that back then either.

I'm just a Cassandra on these things, a pre-cog doomed to be right but disbelieved until too late.

Lately though my focus has temporarily turned to matters of more universal import. I crossed some kind of threshold with the Zheng/Yang practice so I'm just swimming in an ocean of pure ki. I realized belatedly that Ben's 5 attributes thing is the key, but must be done in a certain way. Yet what's up with that? It sounds rather stupid, as I've been hearing him teach those attributes (or as he calls them, principles of practice) for almost 25 years. Why did it take a chance side-comment from Qian to track-shunt me onto the rails of what my own teacher tried to carve into me for so long? It's because Master Qian, though he does not teach Yang taiji, he absolutely understands the key idea of it. Somehow that little insight has been preserved through the long dismal decades of 20th century Chinese history, all the way from Yang Luchan (died 1873) up through of course Professor Zheng and Ben, but somehow also on a trunk line to Master Qian's dinky little side comment to me last month in Shanghai. What a roundabout to get something that Ben was openly teaching me all along. How frustrating it must be for a great teacher like Ben to have senior students like me (well, he has described me as such, that's all I'm saying) who take decades to finally get the point.

Silliness. I really hope in my next incarnation I can be a bit quicker on the uptake of whatever is on offer.

太陽と鉄

Japanese people never but never mention their famous writer Yukio Mishima. Of course they've all heard of him, but he's considered best (or only) appreciated by foreigners.

Interest Quotient = Zero.

In their mind the name Mishima Yukio = Total Gonzo Whackjob.

I understand. His language and style are difficult, his stories are subtle and complex, his ideas are completely nutso. Not to mention that in today's context he'd be totally orange-jumpsuited and elephant-tranq'ed as a terrorist for creating his "Shield Society". Times have changed.

But personally I have liked him, ever since I was a raw teen and my toughguy kickass Viet war Green Beret 7-Star Mantis teacher, after slapping me silly in Mantis chi sao for an hour one day, flipped me the book 太陽と鉄 (Taiyou to Tetsu; Sun and Steel) as I staggered out the door after class, saying "I know you'll dig this, [Tabby]". Well by saying I like him I'm just proving I'm a foreigner here I suppose.

Here's what I like about him:

1. Certain books, in particular Sun and Steel and of course the Sea of Fertility quartet.
2. His suicide
3. His extreme thoughfulness and extraordinary intelligence as revealed in the preserved TV interview tapes

Here's what I don't like about him:

1. All that S&M gay stuff, not that I dislike gays, though I'm not gay myself, but rather the whole twisted psycho lengths to which he carried things just aren't my bag
2. He should not have deceived and taken advantage of his friend the commander of the Ichigaya JDF base to gain entree under false pretenses.

Anyway I admire how he did away with himself. He just didn't want to get old. We're all getting older. I think he did the courageous thing. And if he spiced it with a bit of performance art, I for one don't hold that against him.

I've been to the Ichigaya JDF base where he did it. It's the same building where the war crimes trials were held, by the American occupation forces. When I went there, no public access was being permitted, it was a fully gated and fully guarded working JDF base. I don't know about now. Perhaps now its a tourist attraction like Disneyland for all I know.  But I found a way to sneak in under false cover (just like Mishima do I hear you say?) Anyway I stood in the small office of the commander (at that time, now just a vacant office). The balcony opens off one wall. The carpet had a large, blotchy, repeatedly washed, stain not far from the balcony doors. The room has a powerful vibe.

I think he did the right thing. Who wants to get old and ugly? Might as well go out with a bang. Good performance art. Not to mention, no matter what anybody says, it takes a lot of guts (pardon!) and fortitude to seppuku yourself with a samurai sword.

Here's what I wrote in my Amazon.com review of Sun and Steel:

Just as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray slashed the ugliness accumulated on his own horribly aging portrait, Mishima, lacking a magic painting, did just the same to his own body - sentenced it to death for the crimes of aging and ugliness.

It is entirely summed up by the following single line from 'Sun and Steel':

"I had already lost the morning face that belongs to youth alone."

If not you then who

Recently I got a Humongous Upgrade Breakthrough in understanding my original Zheng style taiji practice. Oh so that's what it's all about! Damn why didn't somebody say so in the fricking first place. Ironically I need to credit a completely outside teacher, Qian Zhaohong, for this breakthrough insight. Master Qian most emphatically does not teach Zheng style taiji, quite to the contrary he rather disses and despises it. That dissing is natural, I understand and expect it from any teacher of any Style A they all hate Styles B through Z. But that isn't the point. The point is that Master Qian totally inadvertantly gave me the key to my own style. Or I should say, to the Yang taiji, overall. What was the key Yang family insight? Yah that's about it. And that's exactly what Ben's training is designed to get you to. It was just one phrase casually spoken by Master Qian that brought Ben's training all avalanching down onto the broad clear plains of my finally realizing what the frick he has been trying to drill into me all these decades. That's weird. Oh well I am used to weird stuff in MA world.

Back up for second. Who is the greatest martial artist in known historical times, in the world? Not just taiji, but overall, the greatest master ever. Obviously it was Yang Luchan. On that I have never wavered. Everybody seems to agree on this, I think even Master Qian fer crissake. Alright then. That sets the bar. My goal therefore is to achieve that level, YLC's level or above. Leaving aside whether this is or is not possible, is it arrogant to think like that?

No, not arrogant to me. In fact, all of us should be thinking this way. If  not me then who? If not you then who? Are we going to let YLC set the all time historic high? Peak Taiji? That would be depressing probably even to Master Yang himself. So I will do it since nobody else is stepping up to the plate.

This is not pride speaking. In just my MA career (don't even talk about other life) I have been pushed through drywalls, had my arms twisted til tendons and joints ruptured, been knocked down and knocked out cold in the ring; been thrown over cliffs, pushed down stairs, drowned underwater, been whipped and punched and beaten with sticks, swept, tripped, thrown, and stomped in every imaginable way, been submitted from every possible angle, slapped in the face, crushed under 1000 lb. dog piles, kicked in the groin, stabbed in the eyes, all this dozens nay hundreds of times - believe me I have little pride left from the shards of it all. So I know how to invest in loss ( <-- Professor Zheng's great phrase)

But somebody needs to do the job, and as they say if you want something to get done do it yourself.